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Estimating Determinants of Borrowing: Evidence from Greece

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Abstract

The purpose of this study was twofold: to examine the determinants affecting borrowing by urban households in north-eastern Greece, and to examine the amount of money borrowed by those households. The study used cross-sectional data from 2009. The empirical analysis employed was based on the estimation of a two-stage Heckman model and the quantile regression model. Results indicated that young married and employees get more loans than others. Furthermore, the probability of getting a loan was higher for homeowners and credit card holders. In contrast, savings negatively affected the probability of getting a loan. It was also found that amount of loan was influenced mainly by income, homeownership and the proportion of household members working. Households that saved money held small loan amounts. Age affected the high loan amount, but the effect of homeownership was higher in the low loan amount.

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Notes

  1. The Heckman selection model can be estimated either by OLS or MLE. However ML method is more efficient than OLS (Dougherty 2007, p. 277; Guo and Fraser 2010, pp. 96–98; Maddala 1983, p. 259; Puhani 2000, p. 64; Wooldridge 2002, p. 566; Wooldridge 2005, p. 623).

  2. The description of measurement and explanation of abbreviations used in the model specification are provided the Appendix (Table 6).

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Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Lecturer Eleni Sardianou, Mr. Dimitrios Konstadopoulos, Ms. Chyssoula Kaitatzi and Ms. Melina Solaki for editing of the manuscript. In addition we would like to thank Editor Dolan and five anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. All errors and deficiencies are the authors’ responsibility.

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Correspondence to E. Pastrapa.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 5 and 6

Table 5 Basic frequency statistics of the sample
Table 6 A detailed description of independent variables used in the empirical analysis Eqs. (5) and (6)

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Pastrapa, E., Apostolopoulos, C. Estimating Determinants of Borrowing: Evidence from Greece. J Fam Econ Iss 36, 210–223 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-014-9393-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-014-9393-4

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